Implementing critical incident management processes with the ITIL 4 framework

Abstract

This thesis outlines critical incident management, outlining how the critical incidents are identified, escalated, and resolved together with Company 1 and Company 2. P1 incidents are high-severity-level circumstances that impact core functionalities and system availability in the customer's organization. They are differentiated from lower-severity events, and a clear process for incident handling with appropriate urgency and precision is applied.

This document strongly holds that every P1 case must be escalated immediately to the Incident Responder on duty over PagerDuty. A detailed step-by-step response document then guides the conduct expected of both the initial reporter and the Incident Responder on call. Diagnostic tools such as Nagios and the Company 2 Status page are found as part of the investigation workflow.

The first part of this thesis introduces the background and objective of the thesis, highlighting the importance of critical incident management in maintaining high reliability and resilience. Later sections provide a detailed explanation of the Company 1 and Company 2 incident management processes and describe how these have been integrated to create a unified operational framework. This thesis mainly focuses on the management of P1 (high-severity) incidents, presenting an overview of the Company 1 Incident Management process through an easy-to-follow, step-by-step approach. A P1 scenario test is conducted to evaluate the framework’s effectiveness.